


Scent

by Randy_sensei



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, August Prompt Challenge 2019, F/F, Fluff, Prompt Fill, Scent is the prompt, Werewolf!AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2019-08-28
Packaged: 2020-09-28 16:23:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20428898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Randy_sensei/pseuds/Randy_sensei
Summary: Max is still getting the hang on her lycanthropy; so far, it's been both a blessing and a curse. She's getting the hang of it, though, and lucky for her, she's got someone on her side.(Done for the /r/fanfiction August Prompt Challenge 2019, for the prompt: "Scent")





	Scent

An odor carries on winds howling through the damp forests of Arcadia Bay. 

In the dead of night, lit up by flickering neon and strong, white lights, a bell chimes for an opening door. From the seven-eleven, a small girl with shoulder length brown hair strolls out with a slurpee in her hand. Once she stands right at the cusp of the sidewalk, she takes her phone out to check the time and recoils at how bright she left her screen on. It reads three twenty seven in the morning. 

Max sighs, pocketing it away safely, her attention going back to the drink in hand. She moves to the side of the convenience store and leans against the big dumpster placed there, hoping not to get any stains on her hoodie at the same time. She stops to listen to the world around her, her newly acquired heightened sense of hearing coming in handy.

Max hears crickets, birds, all kinds of other night insects. There were so many of them around her, from the flies buzzing around the dumpster behind her, to the creepy little beetles scuttling around on some tree bark somewhere. Max takes a deep breath through her nose and once the scent of lime and lemon slurpee fades from the air around her, other things follow closely behind as she filters through them all.  


The trash first and foremost; she’s learned already to ignore known (or awful, disgusting) smells that might interfere with what she’s looking for. She can smell the pines, the bushes, the trees in between and the dew-ridden grass. Small puddles of water left from the September rains that are dotted around the forest. A family of rabbits somewhere deep within the grove. A stray doe on its own. She moves it all to the side.   


She exhales and centers her senses, then inhales again, focusing. Further away, the scent of blood, damp fur and cigarette breath. The girl smirks beside herself and finishes the slurpee, a brain freeze, sadly, just on the cusp of her senses. She throws it behind her, into the trash and takes a few steps towards the back of the convenience store, stretching all the while.  


The ins and outs of this whole… werewolf thing were still an enigma to Max. Past what she does and doesn’t know, though, the rush and crave on a full moon is one she can’t avoid or ignore, which explains quite well why she’s up at such an ungodly hour. It's fact, and a very obvious one at that. Her dorm life makes it impossible to hide when the craving hits but after tonight, she finds, the window is a perfectly viable exit strategy; just how exactly, she has no idea.  


Vaulting over the chain-link fence bordering the seven-eleven parking lot and the forest, the girl takes off through the brush the moment her feet hit the ground, speed ramping up the deeper she goes into the forest, dodging branches, roots, rocks with surprising agility and speed, only stopping to get past the parts of her transformation that  _ really _ hurt.  


It's a matter of time before she breaks out into a full sprint on four legs as something much, much more inhuman, and something significantly deadlier, scarier. Her teeth are still weird, she thinks, dragging her tongue over them all. Her neck aches every time she transforms under a full moon, but the next time is always easier than the last, always. She– it, perhaps?– runs through the forest in a straight line, only ever banking left when the scent she’s following moves or when dodging an incoming obstacle.  


When a clearing comes around, the werewolf sinks her paws into the ground, coming to a grinding halt. She stands up on her hind legs and takes big whiffs of the air around her, obviously on the hunt for something. Before she has a chance to react as she turns in a direction, something comes out of the forest, directly tackling her, taking her for a tumble through the distressed dirt around her.  


Before she knows it, there’s another werewolf on top of her, one of strawberry blonde fur with something as akin to a smirk as possible in werewolf form. As quickly as she came into the picture, the blonde werewolf gives the one underneath her a huge lick, then pounces off of her, circling playfully around her as Max gets up.  


Shaking her head to get rid of the  _ slobber  _ gives the other werewolf just the time it needs to disappear into the forest again, possibly chasing something. Max gives chase right behind her, eager to find out what the other werewolf has spied to get her so active and riled up in a rare way.  


An inexperienced Max quickly loses sight of the other werewolf as she slows down from a full on sprint. She gives the air a few testing smells to see if she could find her companion that way, rather than use her eyes. It proves helpful as she’s soon back onto the telltale scent she could never forget.  


It's not needed, though. A loud, piercing howl fills the night’s sky above her and Max, like a bloodhound, is onto the source of the sound immediately, bobbing and weaving past trees, shrubbery and other animals, animals that flee at the sight or sound of a werewolf on the hunt.  


She emerges into another, smaller clearing, to spot the other werewolf hunched over a carcass of a deer, no doubt the lone one Max had smelled only a few minutes ago. She approaches the two, nudging gently against the side of the other werewolf, and walking over to the other side, digging into the carcass a bit, herself. There’s not a huge amount, seeing as Chloe had obviously gone a little hungry right before this, but Max gives it a spare nibble or two... Or, of what’s left of it, anyways.  


She moves away to leave her companion in peace and focuses more on their surroundings. In the past few weeks of her lycanthropy, Max has explored much, much,  _ much _ more of the forests surrounding Arcadia Bay than she ever could dressed as a pirate. It was a liberating thought that helped fill in a blank left when she left for Seattle those five to six dreadful years ago.  


Now, things were much better, werewolf transformation and all, despite the bumps in the road.  


Being this far into the forest now gives her more smells to sense, the most notable one being the ocean, followed closely by other animals, the remnants of a recent fire somewhere deeper in the woods, and just a lick of booze and cigarettes and ash, no doubt coming from the sawmill Chloe hangs out at frequently. Or, it might just be Chloe herself, but the smell would be stronger, more pleasant; feel far more like  _ home  _ than this does. It's odd.  


There’s another deer, Max smells, deeper in the woods, and this one is not alone. Leaving Chloe to her own devices with a crunch to follow her, Max bounds to the whereabouts of the deer. She arrives after a solid thirty seconds worth of running. She finds the deer by a small pond, no doubt used as a watering hole by animals in the area. Around her, as she prepares to pounce from the bushes, the leaves are frozen stiff and in tune to the breathing of her body, almost as if they’re afraid to move any other way than in rhythm to her. It gives her a keen sense of self, a concentration she finds hard in day-to-day life.   


Max finds she loves the feeling of the hunt; stalking her prey, looking for an opportunity to strike. At first, the senseless killing of animals didn’t appeal to her, but after a week of starving after regular,  _ human _ food did nothing to sate her properly, she no longer found it senseless, but rather a necessity. Chloe had been a werewolf far longer than Max was, so she had someone to show her the ropes, despite the fact that the other girl liked chasing and toying with her prey much, much more than leaping from the shadows like Max does.  


Like right now. She leaps from the bushes, bounding into where she predicts the deer will run after being startled, and when she ends up being right, her vicious maw and all the sharp points inside stab and rip into the skin of the deer’s neck, twisting once when her hold is solid. She twists  _ hard _ , fast, towards the ground, in one movement. Max has found that that  _ once  _ is usually enough to end the creature’s misery. Even after all this time, she can’t help the small pang of sadness whenever she takes a life like this, but it mysteriously goes away once she’s somewhat sated.  


Time passes as she works on eating the deer, the best parts of an animal, like Chloe had shown her, going first: heart, then the liver second, lungs, stomach lining; simple and efficient. Chloe had also explained that those organs held the most nutritional value in an animal carcass, as shown in research done on regular wolves. Once Max had gotten used to the smell of blood, it was all routine to her. The rest is only eaten if you have the time.  


As more time passes, Max barely notices the carcass slowly getting emptier and emptier. She had seen Chloe eat the bones, too, but Max couldn’t quite get used to it, so with the viscera and neck eaten up, she moves on, eager to get another chance to strike.  


In her past experiences, she’s found that one deer was barely enough to sate a werewolf, Chloe even less so. Since it seems like they each grow at  _ least _ a whole foot in height compared to their human bodies, it probably makes sense that their appetite does, too. And, since Chloe and her bottomless stomach can eat forever as a human, it's just as amplified as a werewolf.  


Standing on two legs, Max smells the air around her, on the hunt for another deer. Not long later, she does find another one, not too far out, either, and sets off slowly but surely. The distance allows her not to sprint to her destination, and she takes the path to it carefully, as something doesn’t feel  _ quite _ right.  


She spots the doe walking gently through the forest with the head aimed away from Max. Instead of spying on it through the bushes, she slowly moves through, skirting the forest’s edge on the hunt. They come to a stop when Max is significantly closer, which is when she takes her opportunity to strike, jumping from the shadows.  


Only to find herself fly clean through the deer, with nothing but dirt in her mouth as she skids to a stop right past it. She eyes it parts with wonder and parts with confusion as she stands up completely on all fours, to find it looking directly at her. The doe’s eyes are a compelling color, like the color of the horizon where the water meets the stars. Its fur has an almost ghastly, spooky quality to it, as it stands stock-still like a statue. Thoughts and words surpass the bewilderment Max feels at the time, but before she has a chance to approach it further, a howl stirs her from her daze and she blinks. She finds the doe gone in the split,  _ split  _ second of her blink.   


After shaking herself out of confusion, Max follows Chloe’s howl, the whole ghost encounter running rampant in her mind. On her way through the forest, she finds herself teetering on whether to tell Chloe what she saw or not. Chloe might think Max has gone completely bonkers, which is believable. But that one time Chloe told Max she was a werewolf was also a ‘you’re completely bonkers’ situation, so a ghost doe might not be as hard to believe.  


With this train of thought, though, Max makes a cardinal mistake, one of letting herself zone out and stop paying attention while running through wooded hills. She dodges the tree she very nearly hits but she doesn’t dodge the Chloe. The two stumble through the woods, rolling around with each other through shrubbery and various other forest floor growths as the forest ground takes a deep dive downward.  


The two devolve into giggles as they turn back to human, the pair still rolling through the mud before they reach a stop, Max on top of a dirt covered Chloe, one sea looking into another. Chloe gives Max a trademark smirk of hers and Max, smiling ever so innocently, leans into the kiss that’s just there, on offer. It starts off chaste, like it's their first date, but slowly gets more and more loving as the two get comfortable on the forest floor. 

Their lips join under a full moon, two oddities of nature trying to get by. 

* * *

“Man, you stink.” 

From under Chloe’s arm, Max giggles. “Nuh-uh,” she retorts, giving the other girl a playful shove, “ _ You _ stink, dork.”  


“No, no,” Chloe ponders with a smile, “I think we  _ both  _ stink.”  


Max scoffs, an obvious joking air about her, “Then you stink more than I do.”

The two girls laugh as they walk through the forest, a path they’ve taken many a time, most of which under the cover a bright, star filled night. Through the trees, their destination peeks out: the lighthouse standing watch over Arcadia Bay. Ashes inside the fire pit are fresh, trash litters the seating logs around the pit and graffiti lines the walls of the small shack next to the lighthouse.  


The lighthouse itself remains untagged, perhaps out of respect or something, but the two pass the fire pit as they move from the edge of the forest, over to the edge of the cliff, and the bench located there.  


Chloe sits down with a huff and a sigh, getting comfy on it and just in time to watch the sun rise over the Pacific Ocean where it meets the quaint little shit hole that is Arcadia Bay, home to fishers, fish, and more fish, where the main exports are drunken truck drivers and preppy art nerds on their way to Seattle or Portland.  


In fact, there’s one standing on the edge, aiming an outdated Polaroid camera at the rising sun. Chloe chortles at her own joke just as the flash on Max’s camera goes off. She looks back with her photo in hand, prying, curious eyes squinting at Chloe.  


“What’s so funny?” she asks, a smile dancing on her lips as she moves to sit with Chloe on the bench. Snuggling into Chloe’s side, she gets a reply.  


“Just thinkin’ about how much of a dork you are,” Chloe says, sighing, “and pondering other werewolf things.”

Max leans her head onto Chloe’s shoulder. “What’s got you wrapped up?” she asks, but receiving a shrug in response, evident in the way her head rises and falls.  


“Don’t know, just zoning out. Kinda like you.” They both laugh and let the moment hang in the air comfortably as Max holds one of Chloe’s hands in two of her own, stroking the top of her palm, the Polaroid camera placed on the bench next to her.  


As the pair sit there awaiting the start of a new day together, they each spend time wondering about different things, be it aspects of their lycanthropy and the different experiences they’ve had throughout, or just the flat out boring air of Arcadia Bay; maybe even something more mundane like school or other regular, not-a-werewolf teen problems... Max’s first times transforming, and the pain it caused, are still fresh in her memory when she looks back on it, the discovery of  _ fangs _ in her mouth even as a human, the keener sense of smell, scent, keener sense of  _ everything  _ had all come as quite the shock _ .  
_

Max’s favorite aspect of her keener sense of smell is just at what range she could feel the comfort Chloe provides. With it, she can stop her mind from going a million miles an hour, kind of like it has a frequent tendency to do. So, for now, she puts it all out of mind, and rests against the other girl, perfectly content in letting the morning Sun wash over the two of them, without a worry shackling them down. 

For now, anyways. 

  
  



End file.
